San Antonio’s Girl in a Coma is a great fit for Joan Jett’s Blackheart Records label. Their latest album, Trio B.C., takes a page from Jett’s straight-ahead rocking tinged with a hint of rockabilly to create a driving, hard-hitting sound. At times, the band cribs from the Stray Cats, The Smiths, Nimrod-era Green Day, a little sixties balladry, and the kind of hardcore you get from the store at the mall. With such a wealth of influences kicking around, there are two inevitable results. First is that the album’s got musical ideas to spare, which in turn can turn some tracks disjointed as the band shoves another section into a song. Second is that in throwing this many things against the wall, not all of them are going to stick.

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Three reasons to see The Antlers at Subterranean tonight…

1. It takes a lot of skill to make an album about cancer really, really awesome, yet Hospice pulls it off. NPR’s “All Songs Considered” says this about the album: “One of the most beautiful and moving works I’ve heard in a long, long time. Just astonishing.” And you could see it live.

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Daniel Johnston is weathered beyond his years, no doubt in large part to psychotic episodes suffered earlier in his life and the drugs he currently takes to combat severe bipolarity. His hands and arms shake incessantly, possibly due to what might be diabetes, and this makes it difficult for him to play even the simplest of chord progressions, which is why he occasionally requires assistance on guitar. Yet those that know him from the 1980s, or those that have seen the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, can still see the young man that wrote songs with his heart on his sleeve.

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